Some days I curse the fact that I'm currently living in the future.
There was a time when things were much simpler. You went through your day, and in the background there were television programs that came on, and maybe you watched them, maybe you didn't. Either way, the time that it came on was the time that it came on, and that was that. There were VCRs when I was a kid, so I suppose if you could figure out how to program the damn thing (which was supposedly impossible, if television sitcoms were to be believed,) you could record a show and watch it later...assuming your clock was right, the tape wasn't so old that it fell apart (anybody remember that particular joy?), or some other thing went wrong, you could perhaps watch that episode of Alf or Family Ties that you always wanted. But, some time or another things didn't work out and it wasn't a big deal.
Now, we have the magic of the DVR. Now, don't get me wrong, I adore this thing. As someone who occasionally is still at his office at 7 o'clock on a tuesday (as I am while writing this) occasionally I miss things when they run live. And when I say occasionally, what I of course mean is every time a show is on TV. The last thing I watched live on television was the Super Bowl, and the only non-football related thing I've watched live on TV in recent memory was the season premiere of The Walking Dead, which aired Halloween last year. But now, praise the gods of tech, we have this invention that can sit at home and record everything digitally for you. You just tell it "Hey, I watched an episode of Chuck once and found it vaguely amusing. Could you do me a solid DVR and record every episode for me?" And the DVR, being the accommodating device that it is, eagerly performs this function for you. Every single time a new episode of this program you fancy gets recorded safely away on your DVR disk, ready and waiting for your viewing consumption. But then, time passes. Television shows change. A show about a witty kid in way over his head in the world of spies jumps the shark, and the witty kid turns into Neo from the Matrix, spawn of the guy from Quantum Leap and Sara Conner from the Terminator (she actually said "I'll be back" once, which elicited a loud, verbal groan from me.) You lose interest. You get busy with other things. Next thing you know, you come back and there are roughly a dozen episodes of this television program still waiting for you on the list, staring at you with their accusing, sad eyes, whispering "Hey buddy, we had fun once, why don't you give it another shot? Maybe things could be better this time? I swear we'll show more of the hot Russian chick's cleavage in some of these upcoming shows." And now you're stuck between your DVR guilt and the amount of time it would take to actually go through and heartlessly delete every episode individually.
But maybe you do take the time to give the show another shot. You turn on "Chuck versus Spy Agency of the Week," and settle in for a nice episode of make-up-sex-like TV viewing. But, oh, what's this? The DVR's jammed up? Sometimes if the disk is full or it's an older DVR box, the damn things get scratched up. Or, (and this is entirely my armchair cable guy view of things) you live in an ancient apartment that gets crap cable signal, and the result is the show skips. Sometimes the sound cuts out. You get to a commercial and the fast-forward button for doesn't work anymore. Now, just the fact that this convenience exists beats the hell out of the VHS days, but that almost makes it worse, because it suggests a level of expectation to the viewer. "This gadget works," they tell you. "All the shows you want, at the touch of a finger." And you buy it, because for a time it all works out. This, of course, makes everything worse when it eventually fails. It's a paradox, in a way. The more successful a device is, the more intense the aggravation is created when it inevitably fails, as all things do. You get used to things just working, and then they don't. It's like a betrayal in a way. "You worked yesterday?" you tell the DVR. "You recorded that episode of House just fine. What the hell happened?" And all it gives you is the little, uncaring, mechanical shrug. "Error 404." Blue screen. Static. And there you stand, your broken expectations in one hand and your proverbial genitalia in the other, and no one to blame but yourself for how ridiculously dependent you let yourself become on something that shouldn't matter at all.
And that's just a simple thing like the damned TV.
What about the internet? I can remember playing Rampage off of a floppy disk on our Tandy 1000, and it was the hottest thing you could imagine a computer doing. Now, I go home some days and turn on World of Warcraft or DC Universe Online, that allows us to interact real time with people on the other side of the world in an environment where more than half a second's lag from keystroke to showing up on the other guy's monitor is borderline unacceptable. I'm typing this on my laptop while, next to me, my IPAD is streaming season one of Damages from Netflix with similar visual quality to what I would have gotten from the television (leading me to question almost daily why I'm paying so much for cable in the first place, but that's another blog post.) It's a digital world, as old people who don't really live in it are fond of saying, and we're all rushing along with it. Really, it's quite miraculous, and makes me feel every day like I'm living in an episode of Star Trek.
Until something breaks.
Currently my modem at home enjoys dropping it's connection to the internet randomly. It doesn't matter if I have one device or three running through the router. It doesn't matter if I'm running WoW, looking something up on the iPad, and talking to someone on Skype or just checking my email. Time of day, usage hours, none of it seems to make any difference. Occasionally something goes wrong, and then the internet shuts off. It only takes a moment of my time, but it's infuriating, as my fractured headset from the other night's attempt at running heroic Stonecore can attest. It's a thing beyond our control, once again the loss of a basic convenience that we've come to take for granted and even depend on, and ultimately this is where it gets us.
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